The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) inspired an outpouring of responses among Canadian cultural producers. Yet, the war and its influence on Canada literature have received little attention in histories of Canadian cultural production. This anthology attempts to remedy this gap and inspire future research into Canadian Spanish Civil War literature. The anthology brings together a selection of diverse literary materials—fiction, poetry, drama, reportage, journalism, pamphlets, memoirs, and other life writing—representing just a fraction of the Canadian cultural production inspired by the Spanish conflict. Many of these texts have never been published before, having been largely dispersed in archives across the world.
This selected anthology joins Ted Allan’s This Time a Better Earth, Hugh Garner’s Best Stories, and Charles Yale Harrison’s Meet Me on the Barricades in the Spanish Civil War subseries of the University of Ottawa Press’s Canadian Literature Collection. Together, these edited texts are now re-circulating under a common banner to establish what we consider to be the first stage in the recovery of anglophone Canadian literature about the Spanish Civil War. To further situate the literary texts included here, we include a scholarly introduction, and a full apparatus of author biographies, textual notes, and explanatory notes. The introduction provides an historical-cultural overview of the 1930s to contextualize Canadian involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the cultural production the war generated. After establishing a historical and cultural context, we explain the rationale we’ve applied to the selection of texts for inclusion. The notes explain specific historical-cultural terms and trace the publication histories and editorial evolutions of each text.

Bart Vautour is Assistant Professor of English at Dalhousie University. He is a scholar of Canadian literature, with a particular interest in the interplay between the history of transnational Canadian cultural production and its contemporary publics. He is co-editor, with Erin Wunker, Travis V. Mason, and Christl Verduyn, of Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics. His is currently completing a monograph project, The Deed Becomes the Word: Canadian Media and Writing on the Spanish Civil War.

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Emily Robins Sharpe is an associate professor in the Department of English at Keene State College, where she is also an affiliate faculty member of the Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

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Dean Irvine is an associate professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University and director of the SSHRC-funded Editing Modernism in Canada project. He is the author of Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916-1956 (University of Toronto Press, 2008), and editor of Archive For Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay (Arsenal Pulp, 1998), Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1924-61 (Vehicule, 2003), and The Canadian Modernists Meet (University of Ottawa Press, 2005). His forthcoming work includes a new monograph, Variant Readings: Editing Canadian Literature in English, under contract to McGill-Queen's University Press, and a two-volume critical edition, co-edited with Robert G. May, of F.R. Scott's complete poems and translations. He is a general editor, with Zailig Pollock and Sandra Djwa, of the multivolume print edition and digital archive of the collected works of P.K. Page and the director and English-language general editor of the University of Ottawa Press's Canadian Literature Collection/Collection de littérature canadienne.

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